TheatreBot: A Software Architecture for a Theatrical Robot

Sharing emotions and intentions is needed for effective interaction among humans, so it is for social robots acceptance, too. Theatre is an excellent framework to test whether a robot can play its social role, since many aspects are defined by script and director, and the development can focus on the most subtle and relevant features. An actor has to transmit emotions and intentions to a whole audience, therefore theatre is an excellent place to test whether a robot could convince that it is portraying a realistic character. In human theatre, people expect that actors show realistic characters that make audience to establish an empathic relation with them. If actors could not make the audience believe in the character, audience will lose any pleasure to continue looking the play. This realism is obtained by showing realistic human-human interactions. The architecture presented in this paper aims to be the cornerstone to build a theatrical autonomous robot that could express emotions and intentions during a play. To accomplish this goal, the robot exploits a social model of the world to represent its character's feelings and belief about the world. Moreover, the concept of emotional state is used to add emotional features on actions that should be performed, according to the script and director's suggestions.